IQReport

The solution for reproducible research and efficient reporting in Microsoft Word

In many scientific and technical environments reports need to be written. Often a large number of figures, tables, text files, in-line text, and numerical values need to be added. Reporting is often complicated by the corporate requirement to use Word as software for report writing, leading to scientists having to copy and paste figures and results manually in a very time consuming and error-prone process. And often the source data changes in the last moment and analysis + reporting need to be repeated …

Description

The goal with the development of IQReport was to allow writing of reports in a powerful markup language and generation of well-formatted Microsoft Word documents with a great flexibility in terms of styles used in Word, even allowing to use original corporate Word styles out of the box. IQReport tremendously speeds up the report writing process. It has a very shallow learning curve and a user-friendly interface:

IQReport report syntax is based on Markdown

The syntax in which reports for IQReport are written is called “Report Markdown” and abbreviated by “RMD”. Essentially it is an extension of the well known Markdown syntax. It thus allows to easily format the document with the typical features (main text, font properties, itemized and numbered lists, headings and subheadings, mathematical equations, etc.). The language has been extended in RMD to also allow cross-references, inclusion of tables, figures, and text files with definition of the desired word styles, un-numbered and numbered section headings, title page, desired ordering of table-of-contents/tables/figures. All entries in table cells can be referenced and used in the text as in-line numbers or text-pieces. Syntax highlighting for RMD is available for the well-known Notepad++ text editor.

Support of R and MATLAB

Due to the separation of the approach into 1) generation of results and 2) report generation, IQReport is independent of a users preference for tools that generate the results. R and MATLAB are fully supported at the moment. The inclusion of tables into this approach requires to save the table content information as a text file in a specific format. Auxiliary functions for R have been developed, that allow to convert any R data frame or R matrix into the required format. IQM Tools is supported by the fact that IQM Tools already uses the required format for output tables (e.g. NONMEM or MONOLIX parameter tables). Additionally, when IQM Tools is not used, similar functions are available for MATLAB.

Availability

IQReport can be downloaded from the links on the right side of this page.